Monthly Archives: March 2012

A worldwide network of hackers has managed to gain access to the most secure networks on the Internet. The leaderless and faceless group, known as Anonymous, has infiltrated networks of the CIA, Interpol, email accounts of presidents, and has taken down the major web properties of global corporations. During its near-eight years of existence, Anonymous hackers have exposed a huge network of neo-Nazis in Germany and a stealth online child pornography ring.

In early 2002 a more lucid nationwide process for organized, socially involved anarchism was begun in Brazil. Ten years ago the Fórum do Anarquismo Organizado (FAO – Forum of Organized Anarchism) was created with the aim of coordinating regional groups and also of seeking to build a Brazilian anarchist organization endowed with a common political project. Since then we have been able to move this process forward and consolidate Specific Anarchist Organizations in several states.

Last night three racist monuments were attacked: Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, and the White League statue. The monuments were graffitied, respectively, with “For Trayvon Martin,” “For Justin Sipp,” and “For Wendell Allen” and splashed with paint. We mourn these young mens’ deaths and strike out in retaliation against the system that brought them about. The system that celebrates slave owners and racist lynch mobs is the same system that exonerates killer cops and racist vigilantes. We want memorials to these fallen innocent youths, not to slave owners and racist mobs.

In her makeshift classroom in lower Manhattan, Lisa Fithian turns to a group of several dozen students, squares her shoulders, and issues a challenge: “Does someone want to be a cop and come get me?” A tall redhead abruptly breaks out and lunges at her, but Fithian, a petite, den-motherish 50-year-old, head fakes and bolts away. Cheers erupt from her pupils, Occupy Wall Street protesters intent on shutting down the New York Stock Exchange the following morning. Another pretend cop moves in, and this time she drops to the ground, flopping like a rag doll as the officer struggles to drag her away. Fithian stands to deliver her lesson. “Of the two choices, running away or going limp, what does running away communicate?” she asks.

What is violence? Who gets to define it? Does it have a place in the pursuit of liberation? These age-old questions have returned to the fore during the Occupy movement. But this discussion never takes place on a level playing field; while some delegitimize violence, the language of legitimacy itself paves the way for the authorities to employ it. In response to the recent backlash against diversity of tactics, we explain why we consider this an important principle for anyone invested anticapitalist resistance.

Around March 15th, 2012 we paid a visit to the Willow West RBC branch and attacked both drive-thru ATMs with paint bombs. We have nothing but contempt for these capitalist institutions that uphold and perpetuate the forced conditions and misery of this society. Let us not forget, (nor forgive!) that it is largely the banks that act as financial advisors as well directly finance the State’s projects and systems of social control. For example, RBC currently has its’ greasy paws in the Toronto South Detention Centre in Mimico, ON acting as the financial advisor to ITS (EllisDon & Fengate Capital) who are constructing the prison.

This small gesture of revolt is dedicated to all of the G20 prisoners/defendants & to ALL of the imprisoned international anti-authoritarians – especially the dignified Luciano “Tortuga” Pitronello.

A Las Barricadas is a boardgame about conflict between two opposing social forces, namely that of the state and of anti-authoritarian demonstrators. It is a two-player game with each player representing one of these social forces, the theatre of this conflict being that of the street demonstration. It is being developed and designed by the Black Flag Games collective, committed to the idea that games and interactive media can have an impact in the struggle for a free and cooperative world, and to the ideals of free culture. Their aim is to deliver professional play experiences that enrich a participatory entertainment culture.

On saturday the 23.3.2012 we attacked a minor office of Stora Enso in Tampere, Finland with paint bombs. We show our solidarity to the alternative social center Elba in Warsaw that was evicted by Stora Enso on 16.3. We also show our solidarity to Brazil`s Landless Worker`s Movement and people in Guangxi, China, who have both been brutally repressed because of eucalyptus plantations for Stora Enso.

In addition, this is an open call to all comrades to show their solidarity to the people affected by the greed and inhumanity of the multinational paper giant Stora Enso. Finnish state is the biggest owner in the company so you have plenty of infrastructure to choose from besides the mills and offices of Stora Enso.

A few changes, additions, and corrections to the final schedule of 8 days of anarchy (of which today is Day One) which happens every year in the Bay Area.

The first is a substantial addition. The opening panel to the 13th annual BASTARD conference is a panel discussion of the post-situationist history of the 70s through 90s in the Bay Area by members of the “Anti-Bureaucratic Bloc”. This starts at 10:30 and will shock many participants with the similarities between then and now.

During the celebration of the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, the phrase was repeated again and again: “See you in May.” The phrase refers to the plans for this coming May Day–the historical workers’ holiday and a day of action for many causes around the world–which this year will bring Occupy protests in many cities, including a call for a general strike in New York. But we won’t have to wait until May, it seems. Protests have been kicking off all week.

The struggle over public space has been a long one. On the one hand, there are the forces of control. There are commercial interests which see the commons as theirs – to transport their goods, to advertise and sell their products, to facilitate the functional operation of the machine. Acting on their behalf are the police and politicians, who enforce this relationship of the public to the commons by criminalizing those who would dare to re-imagine a different use for it. They have had centuries to perfect the practice of maintaining order and compelling obedience.But wherever there are those who seek control over others, inevitably movements of resistance arise, movements aimed at liberating public space from capitalists and authoritarians. The Diggers, in 1649, had already started to challenge the hegemony of the ruling class over the commons, declaring their right to make use of it to feed themselves. They were eventually crushed by landowners and the government. Since then, the struggles can be traced, linking the Diggers with the Paris Commune, the Paris Commune with the Oakland Commune. And before, after, and in between, lay all of the small forgotten acts of rebellion, uncountable but building towards the same end.

I recently decided to design a few pieces for an anarchist fashion show coming up in Boston in April (it’s a fundraiser for the Anarchist Black Cross). A perfect opportunity to combine two of my passions (textile craft and anarchism), I went to the metaphorical drawing-board at once! I looked up anarchist symbolism, read about why anarchists wear black and even trolled Etsy for anarchism related products. In the course of this, I turned up some pretty interesting information.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be blogging a little bit about anarcho symbolism and fashion. Before you get your (black, utility-pocket clad) knickers in a knot, remember that anarchists have long had an interest in wearing their ideals. From the Paris Commune to punk shows, anarchists have chosen specific colors and symbols to represent themselves to the capitalist, statist world around them.

After several years of publishing silence, Left Bank Books Collective is pleased to announce the restart of its publishing project. We will be publishing books, as well as pamphlets, both repressings, and original works. To kickoff the project, we are releasing to the world two pamphlets. The first is a repress of the first pamphlet Left Bank ever published, The Kronstadt Uprising of 1921, written in 1975 by one of Left Bank’s founders, Lynne Thorndycraft, with a cover printed on a letterpress (feels nice in your hands!) right here in Pike Place Market.

We firmly believe that the well-being of our children and families requires this action.
– King County Superior Court Presiding Judge Richard McDermott

King County representatives have a great new plan to fix the decrepit, foul-smelling Youth Services Center*: bulldoze it, rebuild it with new and improved “urban design,” and add some condos. Problem solved!

To pay for this, County leaders are currently working to get a $200 million property tax levy on the primary August ballot. If it passes, home-owners will be expected to pay 7 cents per $1,000 of assessed value, or about $20 per year for a home assessed at $350,000, for 9 years.

According to The Seattle Times, this is how they intend to spend that heaping pile of cash: “The county would move some buildings back from their current locations near street fronts and concentrate them closer to the center of the campus. County officials would then sell to developers nearly 3 acres at three corners of the property. The idea is that developers would pay about $16 million for the land, which would help to offset construction costs and enliven the area with retail and residential projects.”

Bohemians and anarchists have joined forces to fight the gentrification of their living space

Darko stands behind an iron gate, his bare chest daubed in red paint with the words “victim of bank”. Four floors above him Reza, an Iranian painter, leans out of the window to pull up a basket of provisions.

The artists are among 20 who have locked themselves into Tacheles, one of Berlin’s last bastions of alternative subculture, and are fighting eviction ahead of plans to develop it as an office and luxury apartments complex.

“It will be a catastrophe for Berlin if this goes,” says Darko, a painter from Bosnia who came to Berlin for a weekend, fell in love with Tacheles and stayed. “There are very few places like this anywhere in the world, particularly in the centre of a capital city and five minutes from the government quarter.”

The upfront and in your face Class War that began in Wisconsin gave impetus to the Bourgeois on a national and international level to begin, continue and extend Economic and Social Austerity Measures. While economic austerity measures are direct means to alleviating the crisis of political economy and the most well-known forms of austerity, let us explain firstly what we mean by “social austerity”. In an effort to reverse the fall of the rate of profit, the ruling class undercuts workers’ rights to organize for better wages as to facilitate the overproduction of commodities with relatively little to no loss in the profits of the Capitalist. Parallel to this the ruling class can expect dissent and ferment amongst workers. So taxes are alleviated to the working class to facilitate an expansion of the Police State which in turn suppresses them. The Tottenham, L.A. and Seattle Riots/Actions against the heightening of the Police State following Wisconsin and the Arab Spring in the face of worsening economic conditions is a sure sign that this a material reality of the world we live in and that there is a medium of struggling against the state in these measures that is class based and not activist based.

After several years of publishing silence, Left Bank Books Collective is pleased to announce the restart of its publishing project. We will be publishing books, as well as pamphlets, both repressings, and original works.

To kickoff the project, we are releasing to the world two pamphlets. The first is a repress of the first pamphlet Left Bank ever published, The Kronstadt Uprising of 1921, written in 1975 by one of Left Bank’s founders, Lynne Thorndycraft, with a cover printed on a letterpress (feels nice in your hands!) right here in Pike Place Market. The second is a new essay by John Zerzan titled The Origins of the 1%: The Bronze Age, with covers silkscreened on shiny “bronze” paper. Both of these pamphlets will be available at the 2012 Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, and of course, in our shop. Upcoming is a new edition of Peter Gelderloos’ How Nonviolence Protects the State, which we swear will be finished before the 2012 Seattle Anarchist Bookfair. Before long we should have our published wares available for mailorder on our website as well.

The struggle for power between different political groups, as expected, didn`t give solutions to the most pressing social problems of workers in Russia. Elections come and go, but our situation isn`t changed for the better.

Continuing the Chrome extension hacking (see part 1 and 2), this time I’d like to draw you attention to the oh-so-popularAdBlock extension. It has over a million users, is being actively maintained and is a piece of a great software (heck, even I use it!). However – due to how Chrome extensions work in general it is still relatively easy to bypass it and display some ads. Let me describe two distinct vulnerabilities I’ve discovered. They are both exploitable in the newest 2.5.22 version.

Scientists are a famously anonymous lot, but few can match in the depths of her perverse and unmerited obscurity the 20th-century mathematical genius Amalie Noether.

Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almightyHiggs boson. Yet Noether herself remains utterly unknown, not only to the general public, but to many members of the scientific community as well.

Afghan villagers near the site where US Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is alleged to have murdered 16 civilians, including nine children, claim US troops — just days before the shooting — lined them up against a wall after a roadside bombing and told them that they, and even their children, would pay a price for the attack.

Although the villagers account could not be independently verified by the Associated Press, “their claim that the shootings by a US soldier may have been payback for a roadside bombing has gained wide currency in the area and has been repeated by politicians testifying about the incident to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.”

In the United States, where Americans broadly accept the lone-shooter explanation offered by the US military, the media focus has been mainly on Bales’ “state of mind” and what impact the massacre might have on public support for the ongoing…

The following is a transcript of a Democracy Now! segment on revelations that the NSA is building a massive new spy center.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: A new exposé in Wired Magazine has revealed new details about how the National Security Agency is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program codenamed “Stellar Wind.” According to investigative reporter James Bamford, the NSA has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency. This includes the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases and other digital “pocket litter.”

AMY GOODMAN: In addition, the NSA has also created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. James Bamford writes the secret surveillance program “is, in some measure, the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration,” but later killed by Congress in 2003 due to privacy concerns and public outcry.

Do you watch movies via a wireless connection on your laptop, tablet, smartphone or even TV set? If so, have you received a love letter from your service provider informing you to either go on a digital data diet or plan to pay more to suck down more streaming 1s and 0s? If not, it will arrive shortly.

The leading wireless companies are changing the usage and pricing models they have long used, shifting the industry from one with “unlimited” plans to “limited” deals.

These new limited plans tier data downloads to the ability to pay. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Virgin Mobile have either introduced or plan to introduce “data cap” or throttling programs on their 3G and 4G wireless users. Sprint remains the only leading provider offering an unlimited data plan that isn’t subject to throttling.

For the vast majority of human history, the only form of government was the few ruling over the many. As human societies became settled and stratified, tribal chiefs and conquering warlords rose to become kings, pharaohs and emperors, all ruling with absolute power and passing on their thrones to their children. To justify this obvious inequality and explain why they should reign over everyone else, most of these ancient rulers claimed that the gods had chosen them, and priesthoods and holy books obligingly came on the scene to promote and defend the theory of divine right.

It’s true that religion has often served to unite people against tyranny, as well as to justify it. But in many cases, when a religious rebellion overcame a tyrant, it was only to install a different tyrant whose beliefs matched those of the revolutionaries. Christians were at first ruthlessly persecuted by the Roman Empire, but when they ascended to power, they in turn banned all the pagan religions that had previously persecuted them. Protestant reformers like John Calvin broke away from the decrees of the Pope, but Calvinists created their own theocratic city-states where their will would reign supreme.

Occupy Seattle’s General Assembly met on 3/22/2012 and agreed through consensus on this statement and committed to further action on behalf of port truck workers: Since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which gave collective bargaining rights to some workers and legalized part of the labor movement in the United States, large populations of workers, such as farmworkers, domestic laborers, and port truck drivers (currently classified as “independent contractors”) have been left in the cold.

The multitudes continue their fight against the encroachment of the Empire into every aspect of their lives. They fight back against global capital’s unending thirst for resources, for lands, for water, for everything of the Earth, and against the brutal exploitation of the very bodies of the working people that come with this. We see this all over South and Central America where tribes, peoples, communities, at times even governments, desperately attempt to either roll back time to a “happier” period of national self determination, or roll on time to a global period where it is the working people of the world who run their lives.

The vandalist is recognizable as the most obnoxious brat conjurable in society’s collective imagination. These Bart Simpsons struck once again this past weekend, pranking the Left and their enemies on multiple occasions in a joyous effort to devalorize everything it holds sacrosanct.

They started on Friday night by crashing a party held by the multinational corporation Verso, an enterprise which has made its fortune by cornering the market on socialist-oriented literature. While the paper they sell contains words arguing for revolt against the commodity form, they themselves ruthlessly defend it using lawyers, security guards, Zizekians, and other such police to prevent unauthorized consumption of their product. Such was the case when Verso lawyers sent a cease and desist notice to the beloved AAAARG.org, a website that hosts free PDFs of critical theory, putting Verso in the same category as the MPAA, RIAA, DOJ, and all other litigious enemies of free cultural exchange.

As young hip communists danced to 90s music in the bourgeois Verso loft, at least a dozen vandalists filled their bags with Verso’s inventory, intending to trade, gift, and fill their collective libraries with the volumes. The Robin Hood-like act was not looked at kindly by the Verso bosses and their Pinkertons, however, who finally became aware of the vandalism to their warehouse towards the party’s end. One bad citizen was grabbed, ordered to empty his bag, and threatened with arrest. Several corporate investors flocked to the scene, threatened violence against the bookworm, and declared themselves “true socialists” to defend themselves against the heckles of the proletarian attendees, generally sympathetic to the act of stealing from employers.

“It is a tragedy, I feel, that people of a different sexual type are caught in a world which …. is so crassly indifferent to the various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life.”

Emma Goldman (prominent Lithuanian-American anarchist) 1916

Trans (or transgender) is a term for people whose gender identity and gender expression are different from the sex assigned to them at birth. Trans people have a history of receiving bigoted responses from some sections of the left, of the lesbian and gay community and some strands of feminism. One attack on transgender people has been based on the idea that trans people, by “changing gender”, reinforce existing rigid gender roles. Moving across borders of perceived gender does not reinforce existing gender-roles, any more than migration across borders of nation states reinforces the system of nation states. Many trans people are actively involved in fighting current, sexist gender stereotypes.

Anarchists believe that we will not achieve an equal society by ignoring issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia or by pretending that they will automatically be resolved by revolution. We do not tell minorities to wait until after the revolution for their demands to be met. We see class as the central and fundamental form of oppression, but we do not see it as the only form of unacceptable hierarchy and we do not see it as possible to separate class issues from those of gender, sexuality, race or sex. Trans liberation is a class issue. Wealthy trans people can, for example, afford private surgery, use private transport and choose where they live, thus avoiding potentially dangerous situations. We see means and ends as intrinsically linked, and so a revolutionary movement that does not actively oppose transphobia will merely end up replicating the same oppressions that exist under capitalism.

On February 29, 2012, Red Hat’s fiscal year came to a close and they are expected to cross an important milestone; becoming the first billion dollar commercial open source software company. Whether or not you believe they are the first open source software company to cross this mythical threshold is inconsequential, the fact is Red Hat has done it. With all my sincerest respect and admiration, I tip my “red hat” to this historical accomplishment.

With all due respect to other Linux distributions such as Canonical (Ubuntu) and SUSE, Red Hat is the de facto standard for Enterprise Linux. They have a reputation for building a quality product, have a stable of certified applications from leading ISVs, maintain a “Cisco-like” army of certified professionals, and provide long term support for their products. Unlike the early years of their business, Red Hat’s biggest threat does not come from a new operating system challenger ala Microsoft; it comes from virtualization vendors with all eyes on VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and Oracle.

After a week that seemed just chock full of people being stupid about women in technology, I just found myself thinking back on how it was that I ended up doing this whole computer thing in the first place. I recorded a video a while back for the High Visibility Project, but that really just told the story of how I ended up doing web development. The story of how I got into computers begain when I was unequivocally a girl. It was 1982.

Back then, my dad made eyeglasses. My mom stayed at home with me and my year-old sister – which she’d continue to do til I was a teenager, when my brother finally entered kindergarten eight years later. Their mortgage was $79 – about $190 in today’s dollars – which is a good thing because my dad made about $13,000 a year. We lived in Weedsport, New York, a small town just outside of Syracuse. We walked to the post office to get our mail. The farmers who lived just outside town were the rich people. In the winters the fire department filled a small depression behind the elementary school with water for a tiny skating rink. There were dish-to-pass suppers in the gym at church.

In recent weeks, Theodoros Mavridis has bought fresh eggs, tsipourou (the local brandy), fruit, olives, olive oil, jam, and soap. He has also had some legal advice, and enjoyed the services of an accountant to help fill in his tax return.

None of it has cost him a euro, because he had previously done a spot of electrical work – repairing a TV, sorting out a dodgy light – for some of the 800-odd members of a fast-growing exchange network in the port town of Volos, midway between Athens and Thessaloniki.

In return for his expert labour, Mavridis received a number of Local Alternative Units (known as tems in Greek) in his online network account. In return for the eggs, olive oil, tax advice and the rest, he transferred tems into other people’s accounts. “It’s an easier, more direct way of exchanging goods and services,” said Bernhardt Koppold, a…

On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years…

If you brushed your teeth this morning or flushed the toilet or had a cup of coffee, consider yourself lucky. Actually, if you turned on your tap and potable water freely came out, consider yourself truly blessed. Because so many of us in the United States are in this situation it can be easy to forget that nearly 900 million other people aren’t so lucky. It can be easy to forget that globally we face a frightening water crisis. And it can be hard to notice that even here in the US there are dire threats to our water supply right now.

The people hardest hit by the water crisis are in developing countries — places it is easy for many world leaders (and the rest of us) to overlook. And even the number of those without clean water — last tallied at 884 million — can be hard to grasp. Here’s another way of looking at it: if you take that number and translate it into the population of developed countries, the people living in the world today without access to clean drinking water would equal all the people living in the US, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, England, Italy, Spain, Japan, Australia and Norway.

Since 9/11, the homeland security state has come to campus just as it has come to America’s towns and cities, its places of work and its houses of worship, its public space and its cyberspace. But the age of (in)security had announced its arrival on campus with considerably less fanfare than elsewhere — until, that is, the “less lethal” weapons were unleashed in the fall of 2011.

Oxford University launches Cyber Security Centre Cyber crime is not going away. As the world becomes ever more interconnected and dependent on networks, laptops and personal handheld devices, the opportunities are just too great. The personal information stored on such devices credit card information, drivers’ licenses and Social Security numbers is at high risk and is often targeted by criminals because of the price it can bring on the black market. The Oxford Cyber Security Center is the new…

Return of Lulzsec, Dump 170937 accounts from Military Dating Site Another Hacking group after Lulzsec, comes with name LulzsecReborn has posted names, usernames, passwords, and emails of 170,937 accounts on MilitarySingles.com on Pastebin as part of the group’s Operation Digiturk. LulzSec was a major ticket item last year as the group hacked a number of high profile Web sites all in the name of the “lulz.” After their so called “50 Day Cruise,” the group broke up and went their separate ways.Hacker…